Hi everyone! I am new to this community and excited to learn more about SolidWorks Visualize and rendering.

My company is going to be getting the latest SW with Visualize SP3 and I am supposed to spec out the best possible workstation for designing/rendering.

From reading stuff about this topic, everyone tends to say that Quadro's are the best, meanwhile on SolidWorks website for Visualize Benchmarks (LINK) the numbers seem to say that the TITAN V scored the best for a single GPU... practically matching 2 Quadro P6000's...

I can understand why with its high CUDA core count, and the fact that Visualize SP3 now supports Volta, it seems that the TITAN V would be the best card for rendering in Visualize. While in comparison, Quadro's are great for all purpose - CAD workflow as well as rendering (my guess from everything I've researched about this).

So are the TITAN V's the best single card to get instead of the multiple Quadro Pascal series?

The primary benefit to the Quadro line is that the cards have more RAM onboard. For some applications, such as render engines which load a dozen shaders directly onto the card, this is a very important thing to have. If you watch the GPU utilization during a render, you'll see that Visualize tends to top out around 6-7GB. Thus, the extra RAM of a Quadro never comes onto play.

If you're looking to stick with a single card and you can wait 9 more days, then the new $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti will be your best option with its 4352 CUDA cores, 576 Tensor cores, and 72 RT cores (support for which will be added to Visualize soon (I hope!)). Toss on a water cooler and you'll be able to get a further 20% performance boost. The closest Quadro to this spec is the forthcoming $6,300 RTX 6000, which offers 256 more CUDA cores and 13GB more RAM.

For a 2 or 4 GPU setup, buy a set of the RTX 2080 Ti. You'll end up with 17,408 CUDA cores 2,304 Tensor cores, and 288 RT cores, all for only $4800. For a low GPU-RAM application like Visualize, that will be a nearly unbeatable setup.

We are working closely with NVIDIA and Iray teams to understand when Visualize (and therefore SOLIDWORKS CAD) will be able to support the new RTX cards. As soon as I have an update, I will add it to this thread.

If you don't hear from me by the end of October, someone please ping me. Thanks!

From a practical feature standpoint, the only thing that a Quadro card gets you is the "RealView" feature in Solidworks. For some people, that is a very important feature to have for their workflows. Personally, I find it to be less than useless and always leave it turned off.

Aside from that, I'm not aware of any features in the Solidworks modeling/Visualize rendering workflow that are enabled by a Quadro card.

When it comes to simply displaying the model in Solidworks without RealView enabled, I haven't encountered a model/assembly which rotates or zooms more smoothly on a Quadro-equipped machine.

As a reference, my current desktop utilizes a pair of Titan Xps and my laptop has a Quadro P5000 as an eGPU. I have also run the P5000 in the desktop and there was no performance hit when using it as an eGPU vs internal.

I ended up going with a dual P5000 configuration, which gets me 5,120 Cuda cores and 32 GB VRAM for less than the cost of a single P6000. The screenshot shows my configuration compared to the others I considered. The red minus signs show which stats perform better than my configuration and the plus signs are the stats that the dual P5000's outperformed.

These were the only options at the time of my purchase, but I most likely would have gone with a Quadro anyway due to the full support for SOLIDWORKS because I do most of my animating with motion studies before exporting to Visualize.

Visualize is going to utilize CUDA technology for its GPU rendering so as long as it is an Nvidia card then the more CUDA cores the better (excluding older Nvidia cards of course).

SOLIDWORKS is only supported by Nvidia Quadro and in 2019 it will become more important to plan for better graphics cards than in the past, especially for large assembly modeling and management (cant say too much more but I encourage you to sign up for the Beta if you want to learn more) so I think the P4000 is a good call.

My point is, have the ability to expand out the render farm. I have been using this software for many years (Bunkspeed to present) and used to have to wait a long time to see my animation. I spent close to $30K on this upgrade. Power management can become an issue and that's why I chose to build up the Cubix Expander with a dedicated power supply. I don't believe the Denoiser will work in hybrid mode so I run GPU only but the Denoiser is incredibly fast. It sort of smears the textures and at times is unacceptable. But with this much power I will wait for an hour or two and get a higher fidelity animation if necessary. Certain functions really increase rendering time like dissolves but that is a thing of the past with this machine. I am running a BOXX Apex 4 not included in the price above. If I recall, the new GPU Memory HBM2 is a reduction in power requirement so I would consider this as a plus with the new GPU memory.

Just a little note about the Denoiser 'Smear', I have also experienced this and found it exceptionally frustrating.

So what I have done is change the default settings for it, ie increase the number of passes before it switches on.

I would recommend giving this a go, there is a setting in the User.config file. Its hidden deep - %localappdata%\Dassault_Systèmes\SLDWORKSVisualize.exe_StrongName_m1hrhdwyiihwvztj1jjjmmmt1uiqebob\27.0.0.0\user.config. The setting is called "DenoiserPassCount". It is set as a default 10 but I have increased mine to 25 and it gives better results. I have raised an Enhancement Request to be able to change this in the UI rather than constantly altering a hidden text file